Trekking from the U.S. to the Caribbean and Canada— wind at their back, ear to the ground, listening for “the logos of what trembles underfoot”— the poems in Music For Exile syncretize a host of lyrical, received and invented forms to beckon a “mythic assemblage,” an aggregation of personal and historical losses, intimate and en masse. From walking up Canefield River to hearing a thief on the stairs in Philadelphia, from dredging the voices of New England’s enslaved to confronting familial grief, these poems trouble the ache, that “ironic hunger for home” when home is itself a vortex of violence. In poems of place, poems of encounter, domestic epics and epistolary calls, deGannes allows both the narrative and associative to limn the caesurae in one immigrant woman’s arc. The poems trace and retrace, they crossover, they “draw poison out” they “fissure desire” and proclaim “no one can say gone is gone,” enacting and inviting an expansive reckoning of all that has brought us here. From this, might be salvaged a radical sense of belonging, Glissant’s “knowledge of the Whole, greater for having been at the abyss.” Music For Exile is Nehassaiu deGannes’ first book-length collection of poems.
